A lullaby is supposed to end in silence. Dominique Cyprès's "Lullaby" does the opposite, because its refrain is an instruction to make noise. Three times a father tells his baby to cry, and as the stanzas pass, the poem's real subject comes into focus: the gap between what a parent promises and what a parent can actually deliver.
Look at what "daddy" offers. In the first stanza it is a toy elephant, a bought treat. In the second it is "another song," and the word "another" quietly admits that earlier songs haven't worked. In the third it is a blanket "for the cold," the plainest comfort of all. The gifts shrink from extravagance to necessity, and each comes with an escape clause. The elephant "won't walk," which no toy elephant ever will, so the promise is rigged to fail from the start. The song stops when daddy "’s got to go to work." The blanket may leave the baby "no warmer when you wake." Comfort is always conditional, and always followed by the small hinge-word "then."
That word matters structurally. Every third line ends on "then," the sentence left hanging, and the fourth line drops into a single word: "cry." The stanza falls away like a step that isn't there. After each "if" we expect a solution and get the instruction we started with. It can be read tenderly (go on, let it out, I won't stop you) or as helplessness, even dismissal. The poem never settles which, and that doubleness is where its tension lives.
Time stretches in the same way. The baby may cry "all you want," then "all day long," then "’til you’re old." A bedtime scene widens into a lifetime, and the final stanza hints that this sorrow isn't outgrown, only met again and again with substitutes. The grammar shifts too. "Daddy’s gonna buy" and "daddy’s gonna sing" are promises about the future, but in the last stanza "daddy got a blanket" states a fact. The future tense gives way to an object already owned, which is less exciting and also more honest.
Sound does much of the work. The rhymes are nursery-simple: "long" and "song," "old" and "cold" are full rhymes, while "want" and "elephant" are a looser pair that wobbles slightly, as if the poem can't hold its first comfort steady. The third and fourth lines refuse to rhyme at all ("then" / "cry"), so the pattern never fully closes and the expected lull never arrives. Meanwhile "walk," "work" and "wake" all begin with the same sound and mark the three points where comfort breaks down, almost like a chant of failures. The beat is a steady rock, easy to hum, helped along by colloquial "gonna" and "’til." The lack of capitals and full stops adds to this: nothing is ever finished, and the lines roll on like a tune sung half-asleep.
The repeated "daddy" is also worth noticing. Speaking of oneself in the third person is what adults do with small children, and it sounds affectionate. But it also turns the father into a role rather than a person, someone who is promised, who goes to work, who has a blanket. The poem gives us no mother, no room, no night-light, only this voice and the crying it answers. Everything else is left for the reader to imagine, and the sparseness makes the scene feel both intimate and lonely.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. The lullaby is one of the gentlest forms we have, and the vocabulary here is almost childlike, yet beneath the soothing sound the poem suggests that love is often expressed through objects and promises that cannot always reach the need. The sweetness of the music and the bleakness of the sense pull against each other, so a reader finishes feeling both comforted and uneasy. The poem ends where it began, on "cry," the one instruction that never fails.